08/17/2026
Your child can’t sit still at school and everyone wants to talk about behavior. There’s a layer underneath that nobody checks first.
Look at this photo. One leg tucked under, body draped forward, head propped in one hand. Not a kid being difficult. A kid whose body is spending most of its fuel holding itself upright, with whatever’s left going to the worksheet.
I taught neuroanatomy to medical students before I did this work.
Sitting still is not simple. Your body makes a thousand corrections a minute against gravity that you never notice. Only when that runs automatically is there attention left for spelling.
That automation gets built in the first year of life through movement. Rocking. Rolling. Creeping across the floor. All that repetitive motion that looks like a baby doing nothing is what retires the reflexes we’re born with.
When the sequence gets interrupted, integration stays incomplete. An incomplete program doesn’t go quiet. It stays incomplete. An incomplete program doesn't stay quiet. It stays online, firing in the background, draining energy all day.
Signs worth watching this fall:
Sitting still is visibly effortful. Legs wrapped around chair legs.
Handwriting laborious out of proportion to everything else.
Loses the line reading, or fatigues fast.
Startles easily, slow to settle.
Transitions disproportionately hard.
Tags, seams, sock lines are a daily negotiation.
Bedwetting past the age you’d expect.
Skipped or unusual crawling.
The link between retained reflexes and attention, reading, and coordination is documented as an association. The causal story is still being worked out and you should be skeptical of anyone who tells you otherwise. What I can say is this layer is real, physical, and testable. Almost nobody checks it before the conversation turns to behavior.
Save this for your next school meeting. And tell me which one on that list is your kid.
Free conversation in bio.
In person Thursdays in McGraw, NY online otherwise.
